Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and may provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices include, for example, several types of mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth capabilities.
Many electronic devices include a physical keyboard having a plurality of individual mechanical keys. The mechanical keys of such a physical keyboard include one or more physically moving parts that comprise or otherwise interact with a mechanical switch. Pressing down on such a mechanical key serves to temporarily close its corresponding mechanical switch and hence signal to a corresponding control circuit the user's assertion of that particular key.
Backlighting a physical keyboard is also known in the art. Typically one or more light emitters (such as one or more light-emitting diodes) provide light that passes, at least to some extent, through one or more individual keys and/or around one or more keys to improve the user's ability to discern individual keys and/or the character or characters associated with such keys. In some cases the totality of the light provided in this way can be switched on or off to thereby provide backlighting for the entire keyboard or not as desired (thereby allowing the device to switch off backlighting in order to save power).
Some physical keyboards have one or more keycaps that comprise capacitively-sensitive keycaps. Such a keycap can detect user proximity and/or gentle user contact and can therefore provide the electronic device with another user-input modality to supplement physical actuation of the mechanical keys. While certainly useful, developments to date as regards the foregoing components do not fully satisfy all application settings. As one simple example in these regards, users can be (at least temporarily) unaware of the availability of input gestures that can be used at various times to input data or instructions via such capacitively-sensitive keycaps.